scarfman | Holding my own with the big boys (Reply)

Not that anyone's ever suggested it, but I don't consider myself an Arthurian scholar; I consider myself a storyteller. But today I stole a march on a real scholar, though mostly just from having read Dante more recently.

On the Arthurnet mailing list (sponsored by Arthuriana the Journal of Arthurian Studies, the quarterly journal of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society) the moderator, Dr. Judy Shoaf, wrote last week of Dante's regard of the Matter of Britain as unhistorical. But having just read Inferno for class I remembered that Tristram's in the second circle with the lustful and Mordred's in the lowest circle with the traitors.

Dr. Shoaf revisited the article she'd been referencing, which confirmed that while Lancelot and Guenevere are fictional to Dante's characters, Tristram and Mordred do appear in the circles of Hell. Dr Shoaf's summary of the article, by an M.E. Keen, interestingly also stated that Arthur is the only one of the "Nine Worthies" who doesn't appear in the Divine Comedy at all. Keen posits that Dante, living in an age of city-states, will not have thought of Arthur as a particularly worthy ruler when Arthur's time and place didn't have what Dante thought of as cities, and when apparently Dante held much of the stories as fiction. All very interesting.